The 5 Layers I'm Trained to Work with You Through.
Updated: Aug 29
I’m a lifelong learner. I bet you are too.
Here you are, seeking deeper wisdom for your own healing.
I’d like to share with you here, the path of training I have taken since age 19, and the many different layers of our being as humans this trainig has led me through.
I’ve been in some kind of training ever since my first Reiki class at age 19.
Layer 1: Craniosacral Therapy — Working With Your Body
I started taking Craniosacral therapy training from the Upledger Institute at age 22 and kept adding courses with them over the years from Somato Emotional Release work to specializations in cranial nerves, applications for conception, pregnancy and birth, and pediatric work as well as advanced training where we work with 2-3 practitioners supporting 1 client on the table.
Practically, in our healing sessions, my CST training means I’m trained to work with your body. I can support you to unwind injuries, tension, adhesions, and the unresolved emotional content trapped within your tissues by working with your body through the elegant whole-body network of connective tissue or fascia.
Layer 2: Energy Healing — Reiki on Steroids
At age 24, inspired by the world of energy opened up to me through Reiki, I committed to 4 years of l training in energy healing.
I spent 4 years travelling back and forth to the United States to do my professional training as an Energy Healer at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.
People ask me if this is Reiki. I tell them this is like Reiki on steroids! I learned to read and work with your energy field on 5 different levels. This includes relational cord healing work and aligning you more deeply with the level that holds your intentions and Life Purpose.
My fellow students attending the Barbara Brennan school were very spiritual. I've always joked that I'm allergic to angels and aliens!
My spiritual path has always been earth connected and animistic. That means I experience everything to be alive and sentient and I talk to trees and all the other divine expressions.
Layer 3: Plant Spirit Medicine & 5-Element Chinese Medicine
This led me to 2 years of Plant Spirit Medicine training under my elder and teacher Eliot Cowan. This is not psychedelic plant work. It is ‘household shamanism’ with local plants like your neighbor the dandelion and the willow tree.
My Plant Spirit Medicine Training was grounded in Traditional 5-Element Chinese Medicine.
This is a whole different lens to see a human through than the aura, or our physical fascial web.
In Chinese Medicine, we look at the balance or imbalance of your elemental energies: flowing as expressions through your body systems, mental peace or turbulence, emotional highs and lows, and your spirit.
I ask the local plant spirits to come into your body, mind and spirit to bring more balance to these 5 elements of fire, water, earth, metal, and wood.
No one knows the elements better than our plant friends! No one knows more about how to help you find balance in the place on earth where you live---and they live and thrive--than the local plants.
I continued to be a student under Eliot for 17 more years while he was alive, travelling to the UK 17 years in a row to spend time with him.
Eliot was initiated in the ages old traditional manner as a Mara'akame. This is a medicine person or 'singer of the songs' in the Huichol or Wixarika people (their name for themselves in their language) of the Sierra Madres of Mexico.
I deeply benefited from his humilty and wisdom. I miss him still, since his death in 2023.
My time with Eliot and all my friends within the Sacred Fire community brought me deep perspectives on our path through the different rites of passage in life, and the difference between MIND (ego, fear, information, mental dominance) and HEART (knowing, connection, relation with all things, guidance, indigenous wisdom).
I can see you within those lenses too. You will often get very practical advice from me on how to be in right relationship with the homeland where you live, death, grief, respect, rites of passage for young adults, and beneficial relationship with your ancestors.
Layer 4: Somatic Experiencing™ — The Nervous System Lens
Next, I got led to trauma healing work. What I learned from years of doing hands-on energy work on the table with clients, is that the deepest blocks in our field are from the most overwhelming and painful things that have happened to us. In Barbara Brennan speak, we call these our ‘core wounds’.
To properly train in trauma healing work, it took me from 2018 to 2022 to complete my beginner to advanced levels of Somatic Experiencing™ training with SEI. This is Somatic Experiencing International, the institute founded by Dr. Peter Levine to teach his 50 year body of pioneering clinical work and research in trauma healing.
It took another bunch of years to complete all the case consultation and supervision work so I earned my SEP (Somatic Experiencing Practitioner) in 2026. This means I applied the training in 1000’s of client sessions with y’all for over 4 years, as I continue to do in every session.
Training in Somatic Experiencing™ dramatically changed how I work with clients.
It felt like a key that had been missing. It opened the door to seeing you through the lens of your nervous system. Now I also track the stress and trauma charges your nervous system can carry from unaddressed experiences that overwhelmed your physical and emotional capacity to process.
With the addition of the thread of Somatic Experiencing™ to my work, I started spending more time sitting across from my clients, guiding them to move from sharing their stories of pain and struggle, to dropping into their body to connect with how the story was living inside.
This means less time on the table doing hands-on energy healing, and more time showing you how to be your own healer by guiding YOU to connecting with the blocks in your energy field stored in different places in your physical body as symptoms.
I teach you how to transform and discharge these blocks out of your field, nervous system and body---yourself. You walk away from 6-12 sessions of this work with some real skills and a whole new way of understanding yourself.
Then I was called even deeper into working on the layers of generational trauma underlying the personal stress, grief, anxiety and patterns that look like our personal ‘stuff’.
Layer 5: Family Constellations — Healing What Isn't Even Yours
I did a year of online training in Family Constellations work under my colleague Johanna Lynn during the 2020 covid pandemic.
I keep mentoring with different Family Constellations facilitators to deepen my experience and embodiment of this work. Of course, I also keep doing my own work.
Family Constellations is the layer that still moves me into awe, even after years of doing it.
Here's what nobody tells you when you're deep in your own healing journey: you can do all the individual work—the fascia, the energy field, the nervous system regulation—and still find yourself stuck in a pattern that isn't even yours.
That's what Family Constellations showed me. So much of what we carry as anxiety, as a relationship pattern we can't break, as an ache we can't name, didn't start with us. It started with a grandmother who lost a child. A father who fought a war he never talked about. A family member who was cut off, forgotten, or died too young and too unmourned.
In a Constellation, we set up representatives—real people standing in for members of your family system, living or dead, known or unknown to you—and something happens that I still can't fully explain with my mind, only with my years of witnessing it: the truth of the system starts to move through the room.
People standing in for relatives they've never met start to feel what those relatives felt. The stuck place reveals itself. And often, for the first time, it gets seen.
I can do this work alone with you in person or online. This is relational, systemic work.
With group work the family system has group to become visible in, and we get to experience the true power of community in healing work.
What I love most about bringing Family Constellations into my practice is that it closes a loop the other four layers couldn't close on their own.
The body work releases what's stored in your tissue.
The energy work realigns your field.
The plant spirit medicine and 5-Element work bring your elements back into balance.
The trauma work teaches your nervous system new capacity.
And Family Constellations goes to the root—the family system you were born into, and the load you've been unknowingly carrying on its behalf.
If you are ready to work with an expert and go beyond the work you have done through personal development and therapy, I'm ready to guide you through these 5 layers of your being. Start here.
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